Posted September 11, 2024 by dorfl
Scoring a level in SE is meant to be similar to a Zachtronics-style game. The player gets an overall pass/fail as a gateway to the next level, plus some stats to encourage refactoring and improving this design later.
Passing a level:
The particle beam emitters in the game are an attempt to decentralise the energy production (often electricity) common to many factory games. They encourage spreading production out across the factory and tweaking the layout to get the best beam and color coverage for each crafting machine recipe.
Since the emitters (ok, lasers) do not ramp up and down with factory load there can be significant excess energy. Energy efficiency is the ratio of wasted vs consumed energy. The aim is to reduce the size of the orange waste-energy portion of each bar.
Right now it's not possible to turn off an emitter or control it with rules. It probably should be.
Crafting machines have states:
Utilisation is the ratio of time machines are Active vs everything else. Optimize logistics and energy supply and grow the blue bars for each machine/recipe pair as close to 100% as possible.
This is all about reducing waste items and balancing production and consumption. Items and fluids are counted as:
At the end of a run excess and waste items count as reducing the efficiency rating. Reduce buffer sizes and optimise logistics so machines have sufficient resources, but no more than required.
This is currently just the average (mean) of the three other variables. These might need to be weighted in the future. The overall rating does noting to affect the game progression except imply that you could do better...
Failing a level: